Startups

Home gym startup Tempo raises $220M to meet surge in demand for its workout device

Comment

Tempo workout device with person resting between workouts
Image Credits: Tempo /

When the pandemic forced everyone to stay at home last year, many gym-goers looked to at-home fitness makers to fill the void for their cardiovascular and strength-training workouts.

To help meet that demand, Tempo, the five-year-old fitness startup founded by Moawia Eldeeb and Josh Augustin, closed a $220 million Series C round led by SoftBank. The company plans to use the raise to shore up its supply chain, keep up with increased consumer demand and fuel efforts such as R&D and content. Other participants in the Series C round included Bling Capital, DCM, General Catalyst, Norwest Venture Partners and Steadfast Capital Ventures.

Tempo’s freestanding cabinet, which the company launched in February 2020, includes a 42-inch touchscreen with a 3D motion-tracking camera that consistently scans, tracks and coaches users as they work out.

It currently sells three hardware bundles, starting at $2,495, that include accessories like barbells, dumbbells, a folding bench, a kettlebell system, a squat rack, a workout mat, a recovery foam roller and a heart rate monitor, depending on which bundle customers spring for. Users also pay a $39 monthly subscription to access on-demand and live classes. 

The concept for Tempo came about in 2015 when Eldeeb and Augustin developed SmartSpot, a computer vision-augmented smart screen they sold to gyms that helped trainers analyze and improve their clients’ form during workouts. With the trove of data generated and collected by SmartSpot, Eldeeb and Augustin developed a program that identified fitness users’ most common movement errors and utilized machine learning to offer unique recommendations for each individual user — a program that became part of the foundation for Tempo. 

“Being a personal trainer once, I remember charging $150 an hour,” explains Eldeeb. “I want to create a better experience and offer it to many more people for a lot less. That means we’re going to continue to invest in the core technology that makes that possible.” 

Tempo’s launch came during a particularly opportune time. With the pandemic unfolding, demand for at-home fitness solutions soared. The startup has seen sales surge 1,000% since it began taking pre-orders in early 2020, with delivery delays currently ranging between five to seven weeks — a common issue faced by other at-home fitness companies such as Peloton, Tonal and Echelon. Tempo users have collectively performed 5 million workouts, or clocked 40,000 hours on their devices to date, according to the company. 

The Tonal EC-1

“That [supply chain] was definitely an issue,” acknowledges Eldeeb, pointing to production challenges posed by factories temporarily shutting down or reducing operations in 2020. “We were doing this for the first time at scale, and we’d made small quantities of the product before [launch]. But for our first year in the market, we had to solve all those problems and still ship the product, which was a huge undertaking. We basically had to reduce sales because I wanted the factory workers to be safe.” 

For Tempo, the opportunity to scale is enormous, as the global market is estimated to reach $29.4 billion by 2025. With new funding in tow, Eldeeb wants to capitalize on surging demand, with plans of doubling down on logistics and its supply chain, growing employee headcount and expanding its content to offer yoga and boxing classes later this year.  

With vaccinations across the U.S. steadily increasing and gyms reopening, the big question is whether people will stick with their at-home fitness workouts, throw themselves back into their old gym routines or adopt a hybrid model that marries the two. Eldeeb is betting that now that more people have acclimated to working out in their homes, they’ll stay the course out of sheer convenience, pointing to a Consumer Trends report from The New Consumer published earlier this year indicating that 81% of people under the age of 40 prefer to exercise at home. 

If true, then companies like Tempo will continue to reap the benefits of this shift of fitness into the home. 

https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/12/companies-rush-to-replace-the-gym-at-ces/

More TechCrunch

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during its I/O 2024 by its own count. CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Everything announced so far

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, Ask Photos

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we look at the drama around TabaPay deciding to not buy Synapse’s assets, as well as stocks dropping for a couple of fintechs, Monzo raising…

Inside TabaPay’s drama-filled decision to abandon its plans to buy Synapse’s assets

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and…

On Elon’s whim, X now treats ‘cisgender’ as a slur

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch the AI reveals live

Facebook once had big ambitions to be a major player in enterprise communication and productivity, but today the social network’s parent company Meta will be closing a very significant chapter…

Meta is shutting down Workplace, its enterprise communications business